Labor’s last man standing

A trademark Joh Bjelke-Petersen explosion gave
Mike Rann
his first taste of the federation in action. The year was 1978 and Rann was at a Premiers’ Conference and Loan Council – the predecessor to the modern-day Council of Australian Governments – as an adviser to then South Australian premier Don Dunstan.

“Suddenly Joh says, ‘I’ve had enough, that’s it, I’ve had enough; Queensland won’t stand for this’, then he stormed out with bits of paper flying everywhere and had a news conference at which he denounced [prime minister] Malcolm Fraser and everyone else in the room."

Rann remembers Fraser asking the remaining premiers, who included Charles Court, Neville Wran and Rupert Hamer, what the Queensland leader was going on about. “Wran said, ‘I think, Malcolm, that Joh was supposed to walk out on the next item. He walked out on the wrong thing’," Rann says, laughing heartily at the memory.

Premiers’ conferences were replaced in 1992 by COAG, a change designed to shift inter-governmental affairs from demonstration to co-operation.

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The election of the assertive Liberal premiers
Colin Barnett
in Western Australia and
Ted Baillieu
in Victoria has changed the game again. There is no better example than health reform, where Barnett’s hold-out position was transformed overnight by Baillieu’s election in the nation’s second-largest state economy.

Since the bombastically state-first NSW Opposition Leader
Barry O’Farrell
is likely to join them around the COAG table within a matter of weeks, the fate of the national reform agenda is an open question.

Rann, now South Australian Premier, insists he is optimistic and points to agreements struck between Labor premiers and former prime minister John Howard.

“I think the times have changed, I’ve seen polling on this, Australians actually want us to get on with it and work together," he says.

When he was elected in 2002, Rann was part of a Labor wave that peaked with the election of Kevin Rudd five years later.

With the Labor tide retreating around him, Rann will be by far the longest-serving leader around the table when COAG meets next week.

“I went to my first premiers’ conference in 1978. There’s no one else around the table who can say that," he says. “I’m optimistic that common sense will prevail. The best ideology is common sense."

Asked if that will wash with the likes of Barnett on issues such as health reform or the mining tax, Rann says: “He is much more temperate than Joh. The great thing about the federation is it adjusts. I think you’ll find on a range of issues that the various states, despite being of a different political flavour, will continue to work well together on the vast majority of issues."

Rann says he hopes the health deal is consummated because growth funding is badly needed, but he acknowledges the threat is real. “I hope . . . that ideology won’t stuff it up, which I think it has a real potential to do." He says his confidence is also informed by his dealings with leaders in other federations, such as Canada.

He disagrees with the suggestion that Labor wasted its unprecedented position of wall-to-wall governments to achieve reform. He says the global financial crisis demanded attention, particularly at federal level.

“Labor’s first term, a giant chunk of that first term, was dealing with the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and they passed with flying colours. Now people say ‘Oh we missed the bullet’, the trouble when you miss the bullet is that people say: ‘Was that really a bullet or was it just wind?’ "

Rann says the Building the Education Revolution scheme was a “fantastic success" in his state, suggesting: “Some of the [critical] commentators clearly don’t have any contact with mums and dads with kids."

Some economists say the scheme was a wasteful way to try to avoid a recession and came too late to have much of an impact.

So did Labor, to borrow the well-worn saying, waste a good crisis in failing to drive reform?

“We had a proliferation of things going on under the COAG reform agenda, then we basically got bombed by the GFC. That became the central task, which was getting through that, which was keeping the economy and jobs going."

He does not buy into the idea that Labor’s decline nationally speaks to a broader malaise in the party. He says the changes of government sweeping across the country are more cyclical than political.

“You’ve got to put it in the context of dozens and dozens of victories, and eventually re-elections become incredibly hard because . . . to be in government, particular in a GFC, you have to make tough decisions, which makes re-elections really hard. Politics in Australia is volatile, which means they can change. The message is to keep being bold." He sees the federal government’s national broadband network as evidence that Labor can still think big.

Over the past year Rann has emerged, if nothing else, as a political survivor. Two premiers (Victoria and Tasmania) and a prime minister have departed office since he narrowly won an election last March that many had tipped would be his demise. He likes to tell the story that even his own pollsters and advisers told him on the eve of that election that he would lose.

“And only one of my political advisers, Bruce Hawker, told me that we would be re-elected," he says.

Rann pulled off a rare electoral double of losing the popular vote but claiming a thin majority (two seats) in Parliament. Since then he has enraged public sector and forestry unions with budget proposals to, respectively, cut public service conditions and numbers and to sell the state’s forestry assets.

He has also had to deal with factional scuffles within his cabinet, which this past week led to a wholesale realignment, including the shifting sideways of his long-time treasurer and ally, Kevin Foley.

With trademark nonchalance, which critics would call arrogance, he brushes off the criticisms of his approach to reform and sells the remaking of his cabinet as renewal.

The hatred of Rann in some quarters, even on his own side, is visceral. Faced with a feisty union picket line, Rann required a police escort to enter the Labor Party state conference last year.

“It was organised by the public sector unions, this sort of dial-a-demo, and yes, we got jostled. That’s happened to me before y’know, I’ve been around a long time.

“Yes, there was a big fandango at the conference and the motions were decisively defeated. So the impact on that, in terms of the last three or four years, has been zero."

He says he is confident that the government will not have to follow through on its threat of forced redundancies in the public service because enough people will opt for the voluntary packages on offer.

“Don Dunstan once said to me not long before he died that the hatred of him from his opponents, years after he had stepped down, was of enduring comfort to him. I share that view. There is road rage from some groups, from some vested interests, that they didn’t win the last election. Well, I studied political science and, as I understand it, it’s about winning the majority vote in a majority of seats. That’s what we did. We got a mandate to do the things that we’re doing."

Rann, who will not face the voters again until 2014, is guarded about his future. He could well be Labor’s last man standing.

Some locals suggest he wants to take the mantle of the state’s longest-serving Labor premier from John Bannon, which would mean a departure late next year.

He teased News Ltd journalists last week by saying he was inspired by News Corp’s long-serving chief, Rupert Murdoch.

“I get a buzz out of it. I’ve just been re-elected. It was a really tough election campaign and I’m still loving it.

“I have always said that I will stay around as long as I get a buzz out of it."